Dev Fund: plans for top two proposal runoff

But I don’t agree with your unsubstantiated, and frankly unsubstantiatable assertions.

"The status quo isn't working." In particular seems impervious to reasoning.

Maybe if I understood what your criteria for “working” is we could reason with each other.

The vaporware lockbox that doesn’t exist?

ZCG will still have $3M+ in November iiuc. I suspect it’ll be higher.

How much are they planning to spend during that period? I don’t have the answer to that but it seems like they have a decent amount to distribute regardless.

Frankly, I like both options, for different reasons, but I don’t think there is a reason to panic if more funds aren’t immediately added to their kitty.

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I believe in our future. Do you cast doubt on this communities ability to rise to the occasion?

I do not , I will not, support that view.

Excuse me while I check out of this conversation to go write some code I am not being paid for to support this community.

You said it my friend.

Please do, I hope you accomplish all your milestones. For the community you dont seem to believe in.

ECC, ZF, and ZCG all have millions of dollars worth of ZEC and various other assets. Plenty of runway so that there is no “abrupt, complete transition” needed.

The single highest priority is getting the house completely in order on the rust codebase and removing tech debt. Deprecating zcashd. Unlocking the lockbox can come in time with clear consensus. It does not need to be rushed. By the end of the year, how much ZEC will it have? 1000? Someone give me the real figure. The lockbox pool won’t even have a substantial amount in it until sometime in late 2025 when a disbursement mechanism may be ready. The longer it takes, the bigger the incentive to implement something good.

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So ZCG does have the funds to cover existing grant recipients for an additional year or not? Does it have an amount close to it? I’m still unclear. This is the main question.

Since we are here to discuss pros and cons, here’s my concern: The core idea behind the lockbox+ZCG proposal was keeping the smaller projects going. That’s the problem the ZCG extension was solving. But is that a real problem if ZCG will have ~$3.3M in uncommitted funds when the Dev Fund expires in November?

This statement/question from my survey, “Letting the Dev Fund expire in November 2024 will disproportionally affect ZCG grant recipients because unlike ECC, ZF, and ZCG, they don’t have the runway to sustain operations through Dev Fund disruptions,” which I believed to be completely true. But if ZCG has the funds to keep them going and almost no overhead costs, then it might not be true at all. As someone who has been using this argument to advocate for the ZCG+lockbox proposal for weeks, I feel responsible for clarifying this. Especially because some people might have trouble deciding between the two proposals.

We all want to see great work continue. That’s the whole point of the Dev Fund. The combination of ZCG’s current runway and the “lockbox only” proposal seems to still offer that, along with the added incentives for everyone to get the new funding mechanisms sorted out quickly.

With that said, the two remaining proposals were my top two choices, and a lot of work went into getting down to these two options. Implementing either one of these will be huge progress.

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Fwiw, I agree with all of your concerns and it’s why I created the MoU proposal (17% lockbox, 8% ZCG for 4 years).

It simply wasn’t a popular proposal. I’m a bit stumped why you think 1 more year of ZCG direct funding is so important, even at $50 for each ZEC it’s only another 2 million or so dollars.

The reality of all of these financial stressors are because ZEC has been catastrophically bearish in price for so long. Unfortunately there is no way to change the software to make the price go up :frowning: or somebody may have already done it.

We’re all up against the challenge of conviction here now!

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I can confirm this is likely to be true, give or take. {Add caveats here}^

All previously approved grants are covered and hedged in USD. On my projections of future requests by these same grantees, with a ZEC price of $30, I am hopeful we will be able to fund almost all the most critical existing grantees.

The only extra stipulation for me specifically is I won’t want ZCGs funds to decline too close to $0 in 2025 to ensure we still have enough to keep covering the most critical audit, legal, FPF, support, dev, etc costs if additional funding it delayed. If you’re sure ZCG will receive extra funds by about June 2025 and the ZEC price doesn’t fall I’m hopeful ZCG can manage with these reserves :+1:.

Unfortunately my personal experiences with the dev fund is it’s complicated and takes time. I wrote the first draft ZIP for the dev fund in May but despite my and others efforts ECC shifted the landscape from underneath many of us by refusing to accept direct funding. Many proposers had to then reluctantly accept some kind of extension might be best. This led to a mad rush to scrap together alternative proposals. I think the equivalent of that in 2025 would be someone refusing to participate in the key creation process :person_shrugging:.

Keep in mind this time around we are not proposing an amendment to ZIP1014 which I think all of the proposals did this time, rather, I believe we are going to have to write this thing basically from scratch. But I’m sure it’ll be a smooth process right?

When the lockbox was being finalized the ZEC price was like $18 :exploding_head:. So sure, based on the current ZEC price we are in a better financial position. Keep in mind if the ZEC price drop to that price which was only a mere 20days ago I believe in practice ZCG may be forced to reject a very significant portion of requests from both new and existing grantees.

Unfortunately I also think it’s very shortsighted to only want to fund existing projects. Here is an example and it’s not the only one.

^all the normal caveats

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Why put all our eggs in one keyless basket?

The hybrid model allocates most of the devfund to the locked pool.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

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Well said.

FWIW it seems to me that we should go with optionality.

I didn’t vote for any proposal that locked in to a particular funding model for more than 1 year, and I prefer the hybrid model for the same reason.

The landscape is chaotic, we should be flexible. Why not explicitly plan to transition more (of the remaining) funds to the lockbox when it’s ready, instead of at a point in time?

Am I misunderstanding the options?

price is low due to low adoption

and we know

after DEX with shielded ZEC support if ZEC does not become a z-2-z only coin then adoption will not grow and price will stay low

or is Adoption Low due to price being low?

Why should anyone expect adoption of a network/ coin that has badly underperformed the crypto industry benchmarks for 7-8 years?

and ETH-USD/TOTAL2 for comparison

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Free2Z Debate Question for both individuals:

Both Proposals have the largest slice of ZEC being Administered by FPF (For a fee). FPF is not even a year old, has no experience, no track record, is located in a weak legal environment to get funds back. It is being described as a means to reduce regulatory risk?

Can anyone in their right mind explain to me how this organization is going to control the largest portion of a new DEV FUND with NO EXPERIENCE. , NO BENEFITS?

How on earth can FPF be held accountable, it was made in secret, made to hide, how does work with real world Regulators?

Only the Hybrid proposal allocates a slice of the Dev Fund to FPF to administer on behalf of ZCG.

I encourage you to read this thread for more information:

The proposal has been endorsed by the Zcash Foundation and all five members of the ZCG committee. Here’s a link to my post supporting FPF’s proposal.

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At QEDIT, we’d like to be working on the following:

  • Supporting other areas of Zcash so that Zcash can merge our ZSA development.
  • Asset Swaps: implementation, integration, and tooling for transactions and wallets
  • Transaction Acceptance and User Control: research, ZIP design, implementation, integration, and tooling.
  • ZSA Compatibility with Centralized Exchanges: research.

We expect the funding requirement to fall somewhere in the range of $130k-$180k per month.

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Additional fact to consider 20% lockbox detrimental to Zcash competitiveness:

ZCG is the only Grants Program currently (and continuously) available on the Zcash ecosystem. Other ZKP competitors such as Aleo have their own grants program. Alternative 3 leaves ZCG with no further funding until a NDFM is designed, implemented and deployed. This means that ZCG will have to be (even more) conservative when evaluating accepting grant proposals whereas they are from existing or new candidates.

Question For Today’s Free2Z Debate:
It has been said about design and implementation of a NDFM is “highly likely that a replacement system can be developed and deployed within a short time frame”.

Q: How is it then a problem to continue to allocate funds to ZCG to keep until then if the replacement system would be available in a short period of time?

My opinion:
Given what I know from public information (I don’t have other sources either), it does not sound coherent to me that the interstitial time period between ZIP-1014 expiry and an all-new NDFM is estimated to be short enough to be ok to defund organizations but at the same time too costly or “unfair” to keep the source of funding of independent contributors -that have no runway- funded. Either the assertion is not confident enough or there are other motives behind what ZCG members have described as a budget disruption. Also, ZCG is the only organization that -with its pros and cons- is continously funding independent contributors in a non-direct manner which also makes little sense in terms of evaluating community sentiment on development funds distribution.

I do believe that it is reasonable to improve the ZCG processes in the light of community feedback that came from criticism to the Zcash Media or the ZSA Stablecoin grants where the committee itself has admitted could have had a better perfomance.

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I think the following two points are the most necessary.

What would be the estimated budget for QEDIT to focus just in those two or further more, only in the first one?

As I have mentioned in other threads, I believe that further ZIPs on ZSAs make little sense without the important feedback of having them deployed and working.